Peer Gallery Programme Launch
In early November 2025, Shoreditch Arts Club collaborated with Peer to host the launch of the Hoxton gallery’s 2026 programme, welcoming prominent gallerists, artists, curators, editors and friends to celebrate the announcement of new artist projects on the horizon.
Peer Gallery Director Ellen Greig (left) introducing artists Okiki Akinfe, Dala Nasser, Ceidra Moon Murphy and Leah Clements (left to right) at Shoreditch Arts Club. Photo by Peter Otto.
As part of Shoreditch Arts Club’s cultural events initiative, the club hosted an evening showcase of Peer’s forthcoming solo exhibitions by artists Leah Clements, Okiki Akinfe, Dala Nasser and Ceidra Moon Murphy, examining themes including the construction of place, sovereignty and community. The first instalment is ‘Apophenia’ by Leah Clements, and marks the London-based artist’s first major solo show in the UK.
Apophenia by Leah Clements in the cinema at Shoreditch Arts Club.
Clements works primarily in moving image, photography and sculpture, to explore moments of transcendence. Often giving a language to personal accounts of hard-to-articulate experiences – such as trauma, memory loss, sleep deprivation and grief – Clements’ work considers how these realms, real or imaginary, can operate as radical spaces to address collective experiences of illness or disability.
For their exhibition at Peer, Clements has produced a new single-channel film, alongside a series of sculptural and audio works. Taking apophenia, a psychological state that is characterised by seeing patterns in unrelated subjects and objects as a starting point, this new body of work explores the complex physical and psychological responses she and other crips have to finding meaning in the experience of illness.
BTS still at art’otel London Hoxton, actor Kate Cheka and Director of Photography Lou Macnamara.
On the evening, an iteration of Clements’ single-channel film played in our cinema, observing a central character as she traverses different sites that have contemporary and historic relationships to water as a site for healing.
Clements shot the work on location in Bath, Bristol, Wales and London, moving between the protagonist’s experiences: an ancient thermal Roman bath in Bath, where a temple was constructed between 70 and 60 AD; a medieval well in Wales, which has been a site of pilgrimage and healing since the 7th century; a contemporary luxury spa in London; and a domestic setting in Bristol. The film’s audio mixes a recorded conversation between Clements and writer, Jenn Ashworth, who discuss Ashworth’s 2019 memoir Notes Made While Falling and the writer's own experiences of apophenia, alongside a music score.
Apophenia opens Friday 6 February, 6 – 8pm at Peer, all welcome. More information: Click here
Later in spring, Peer will present a new commission and first solo exhibition in a public gallery by Okiki Akinfe. In autumn, they will present Dala Nasser’s new co-commission, ‘Cemetery of Martyrs’, produced and commissioned in collaboration with Nottingham Contemporary and KM21 The Hague, Netherlands, where it will be presented. Finally in winter Ceidra Moon Murphy’s exhibition will take place. Visit peeruk.org for more information.
In a continued collaboration between Shoreditch Arts Club and Peer, the gallery’s Editions will be on view from mid-March of 2026, including works by Tanoa Sasraku, Anthony McCall, Joy Gerrard and Marcus Cope, with a curator’s tour to launch. More information soon.
Peer 2026 Programme Launch at Shoreditch Arts Club, 3 November 2026. Photos by Peter Otto.
